


Petrichor

by Lilliburlero



Category: Henry V - Shakespeare
Genre: Class Differences, Cultural Differences, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-31
Updated: 2014-05-31
Packaged: 2018-01-27 18:25:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1719062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Fluellen learned to stop worrying and enjoy a bit of rough now and again.</p><p>*</p><p>Content advisory: inexplicitly described sex between a person aged 17 and one of 28; violent ideation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Petrichor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rune_Vanyarin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rune_Vanyarin/gifts).



> For Rune.
> 
> To the prompt: 'Fluellen, petrichor.'
> 
> OED defines petrichor as: A pleasant, distinctive smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain regions.

‘It does have a smell, doesn’t it?’ Gruffydd remarked, his present condition predisposing him to inconsequentiality. ‘The rain, when it dries on the ground.’

Tomasso, whom the same state made drowsy, shrugged in a way that managed to convey both fond indulgence of his interlocutor’s innocence and disgust at the insolence of the weather in daring to rain six days before the nones of July, which the Welshman called St Swithin’s.

‘Where I’m from,’ Gruffydd continued in laborious, heavily-accented Tuscan, ‘the rain doesn’t dry off at all, you see. There are dry days, of course. Sometimes even two or three in a row.’

‘ _Settimane_. You said _days_ by mistake.’

‘I _meant_ days, my sweeting. It’s usually too cold for the sun to dry things this quickly, too. Even in summer.’

Tomasso shuddered. ‘This _Cymru_ of yours sounds horrible. I don’t think I want to believe in it.’

‘I wish I could say the same,’ he replied, but in Welsh.

The free company in which Gruffydd served was supposed to be besieging the fortified village on the hilltop across the valley from the outcrop where he and Tomasso now lay, their storm-drenched clothes spread on the rocks about them to dry. What the company was actually doing was milking the situation for all it was worth, playing off three cadet families of Orsini against each other and their mutual Sienese enemies. Aimery de Porcairagues, their captain, was as good at this as he was bad at composing songs of _fin’amor_ , which he also did continually. When his intrigue worked (as the verses rarely did, because Sir Aimery, as well as being a bad poet, had a face like a old ewe’s backside and breath to match) it left ordinary members of the company, like Gruffydd, with a fair amount of off-duty. Most of them drank and gambled and whored. Gruffydd drank and gambled and learned things. His Tuscan was good enough, now, he reckoned, to understand and memorise a canto or two of the _Commedia_ of Dante. He only had to find someone who could recite it for him.

Tomasso was not that person. He knew many songs, all about the one thing, but no high and holy poems. He had first come to the camp to peddle cheese and milk, the products of his father’s herd. His father was French, a free company man who had been seriously injured in a skirmish twenty years ago and had married the daughter of the local woman who nursed him. When Gruffydd found that he could communicate with the lad, he undertook to befriend him and learn the language of _il Sommo Poeta_. Tomasso’s grimy angelic beauty was not a consideration. The boy was too young, first of all—he didn’t know himself how much too young, but Gruffydd guessed not more than seventeen, against his own world-weary twenty-eight. Gruffydd did not fall in love below his own precariously gentlemanly station, and in the absence of love, he did not swive.

Or so he thought. Whenever Gruffydd had time to spare, which was often, he climbed the hills around Castell’Oriolo in the company of Tomasso and his goats, listening and talking and learning. After about three weeks of it, Tomasso made a suggestion too frank to be considered obscene even, and laughed at Gruffydd’s look, in which startlement and ardour commingled to make him look even more like a vexed polecat than he normally did.

‘You understood that all right, then. I never knew anyone pick up a language so fast and a bit of arse so slow. So, do you want to?’

Gruffydd found, almost to his own astonishment, that he very urgently did. Tomasso led him to the mouth of a cave, where Gruffydd took his rough, ready ease on him. His offer of three silver groats bearing the image of a man notorious for the same vice was met with gentle contempt.

‘I’ve had your silver already, soldier.’ He ran his index finger up the inside of his brown, sinewy thigh in illustration of the point, then put it to his mouth. His tongue flicked over his pouting lower lip. Gruffydd, for whom desire had, until this moment, been an exalted, spotless thing, now felt the kind that is powerfully allied to disgust. ‘You pay me in pleasure.’ 

Tomasso put his hands on Gruffydd’s shoulders and pushed him to his knees. It was, he thought dimly, an outrage. This was an act of fealty, performed only for the high-born beloved. There was no reason for him to acquiesce in it. He was an half-hand’s breadth shorter than Tomasso, but heavier, stronger, trained and armed. Not that the last mattered; there was no honour in using a weapon on a goatboy, but he could have beaten him three-quarters of the way to hell with his bare hands and only break a sweat because on an afternoon in midsummer in Tuscany you never stopped sweating.

He could have, but he didn’t, and he took more and more delight in the things he did instead. Their idyll lasted until three days before the feast of the Assumption. Gruffydd never knew what happened, only that their orders were to depart the morning after next at dawn: no-one told poor bloody swaddies anything. Perhaps the families resolved their differences with a marriage or two, or they got wise to Sir Aimery’s game. There was another job, anyway; Monaco, apparently. 

The occasion of their parting was necessarily hurried, but energetic and wholly free of regret. He gave Tomasso one of his two gold rings, the one inscribed _dieu vous garde_. (The other bore a picture of St Barbara and read _nul awt_ ; he liked it less than the first, but felt its protestation of fidelity dishonest, though there was but little chance the boy would ever learn his letters, or for that matter keep the ring. Moreover, it probably didn’t do to give away St Barbara when you were going into action against the Genoese. Or possibly for the Genoese. Either way, you wanted her on her side.) He never found anyone to recite Dante for him.

In time, Gruffydd almost forgot the boy who had taught him to fuck without loving, and made his life a deal easier for it, though he still fell in love sometimes, and it was still usually inconvenient. Gruffydd fought in England and Wales, most of all in France, filthy, bloody campaigns characterised above all by ground that never seemed to get dry. During one of them he met the man he would love for the rest of his life, and love stopped being a nuisance and became his chief sustenance. The weather seemed to get worse year on year. The wars went well for the English, and then they went badly, and in the year that La Pucelle appeared at Orléans, Gruffydd, injured, arthritic and breathless, gave up soldiering for good. He longed for Wales, but there was nothing left for him there: the wealthier neighbour to whom he leased what was left of his ancestral lands, a few acres that wouldn’t sustain a modest family of mountain goats, had long since ceased paying the rents, which didn’t amount to enough to get your boots mended anyway. He settled in Kent, in the house of his old friend and comrade Tom Gower. And in that verdant corner of England, where the climate is mild and sweet, on the very hottest midsummer days, you can sometimes smell the rain drying on the rich and fertile ground.

**Author's Note:**

> A sub-Shakespearean attitude to historical accuracy pertains: the location and the dispute in which Fluellen's company is fighting are imaginary. Apparently medieval Wales did celebrate St Swithin on 2nd, not 15th July, though, and the ring Fluellen somewhat reluctantly hangs onto is based on [this one](http://education.gtj.org.uk/en/item1/25944).


End file.
